


r/leverage

by blenderfullasarcasm



Series: Misc Oneshots [26]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Leverage
Genre: Case Fic, Found Family, Gen, Heist, Magic, Multi, Sort Of, hardison starts a reddit, let's go steal a wizard, remus posts to it, sophie takes over the ministry of magic, to find clients
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-15 02:41:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28931175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blenderfullasarcasm/pseuds/blenderfullasarcasm
Summary: Reddit poster ‘rjlupe’ or, as his employment paperwork referred to him, Remus Lupin, was a very strange person, and Hardison was actually kind of intrigued.aka:"Let's go steal a child.""Isn't that kidnapping technically?""Eh, don't worry about it."
Relationships: Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer, Lowkey though
Series: Misc Oneshots [26]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1217241
Comments: 22
Kudos: 196
Collections: Harry Potter Fanfic Must Reads, Secret Snipers Exchange 2020





	r/leverage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Thia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thia/gifts).



> ...yeah don’t think too hard about when this takes place haha
> 
> tw: implied canon-typical dursley's treatment of harry, microaggression

"...And here's your desk, Mr. Lupin. If you have any questions, please let me know!" said the cheerful woman who had introduced herself as the head librarian. Remus, who had only ever interacted with one librarian in his entire life, was still having trouble reconciling her pleasant and outgoing demeanor with Madam Pince's strict and disapproving one.

...In hindsight, it had perhaps been less inherent to Madam Pince herself and more to the fact that her job had consisted of maintaining books and order among young children with sticky hands and less than perfect volume control.

Remus smiled wryly. He and his friends probably hadn't helped on that front, he thought, not without a swirling mixture of grief and rage settling in his stomach. They had, however, prepared him for living in the muggle world with little to no prior experience. Or, rather, covering for his friends' pranks (and, occasionally, his own) meant he'd had significant practice in manufacturing plausible reasons why one might know nothing about something that he really should. It was a pity that it was so much easier to find jobs in the muggle world than the wizarding one due to his... _condition._ He would've liked to see how far he could get into a Divination mastery before someone figured out that he'd never taken a Divination class in his life.

"I feel I should confess, Ms. Jones, that I am not very familiar with this computer system," he said, as if he were familiar with any computer systems at all. He wasn’t even entirely sure that there were multiple types.

“Ah, a Mac man, are you?” the head librarian said, nodding sympathetically. Remus returned her nod, desperately hoping that she wouldn’t ask which system he _was_ familiar with. “You’ll pick it up quickly enough - there’s a manual in the first drawer, I believe, but since I’m right over there - ” She gestured to a nearby pile of odds and ends that Remus was slightly surprised to discover, after a few moment’s careful study, was actually a desk. “ - feel free to ask me for help. And please, call me Cynthia. We'll be working together and ‘Ms. Jones’ makes me sound like an old maid.”

“Remus, then. And may I say, Cynthia, that you don’t look a day over twenty,” said Remus, who was only just past twenty himself but looked closer to forty thanks to his prematurely greying hair, aching joints that were too often pushed to their limits, and some judicious styling choices because if he was going to look like an old man then he might as well present himself as one. It was a good excuse for not being familiar with the apparently ubiquitous ‘computers’ that muggles used, in any case.

Cynthia Jones, who wore her dark but greying hair half up in a bun secured with a pencil and left the rest to cascade down her back in frizzy waves in a way that reminded Remus painfully of Lily, rolled her eyes but seemed faintly pleased. “Now, I don’t expect you to get much done in your first couple of days, but I would like you to familiarize yourself with the system and help me reshelve books in the morning.”

Remus had spent many a detention reshelving the books in Madam Pince’s library, the only one in his year that she’d trusted enough for the job, so that part of the job he was at least familiar with. “I could start that now, if you’d like?”

Cynthia grinned approvingly. “I think I’ll enjoy working with you, Remus.”

It only took Remus a few days to discover that computers were not, in fact, as terrifyingly complicated as he’d feared. There was certainly a learning curve, but nothing exploded, which was a definite improvement on his learning experiences in Potions.

In fact, it got to the point where Remus was able to finish his work for the day with half an hour to spare by the end of his first week, even with judicious “Google-ing” of how certain computer functions worked.

Cynthia noticed, of course, and told him that she didn’t mind if he went on Twitter or Reddit or something while she was finishing up, since she had promised to show him how to do interlibrary requests after hours.

“What’s Reddit?” Remus asked blankly, which derailed that conversation entirely.

Hardison was feeling pretty pleased with himself, actually. This was perhaps his greatest feat yet - nay, his magnum opus.

...In terms of Reddit threads, that was.

Which, okay, on the grand scale of things, was nothing compared to even just getting himself on the Oscars guest list for the fifth time.

Or even his shiny new Magic: The Gathering subreddit post, which currently had a hundred upvotes, none of which were from his bots.

_However._

It _would_ make it easier to find clients, but not for people to find _them,_ which was definitely a plus because Hardison would prefer to not interact with Sterling again in this lifetime, thanks.

Basically, what he’d done was create a new thread, which had been easy enough, then spoofed a bunch of IP addresses and then written up what he’d remembered from the interviews with some of their old clients. The trick was getting their ‘voices’ right, because Reddit wasn’t constrained by fancy-schmancy formal email writing, which meant that everyone had their own typing and speech style. It’d been harder than he’d been expecting, honestly, since a lot of the differentiation in his grifting characters was their accents, which didn’t come across in written form.

In the end, Hardison had just created a program that did it for him, which was much faster.

Once he had the text, he posted and backdated the pleas for help and used some more spoofed IP addresses to upvote, downvote, and reply to the posts, then added a couple inspirational “I don’t know how it happened, but my clinic reopened/I won my case/I got my house back”-type updates.

And, voila, there was a Reddit thread that looked legit enough that no one would suspect it had been created an hour ago.

Hardison called it r/leverage, because what else was he going to call it.

Poster ‘rjlupe’ or, as his employment paperwork referred to him, Remus Lupin, was a very strange person, and Hardison was actually kind of intrigued. 

His Reddit thread had caught on faster than he’d expected, which was impressive, because Hardison had a pretty good grasp of his competency. It was a cold day in hell before he _under_ estimated himself, but apparently he should just pack up and move to the ninth circle and build an igloo or something because these winds of success were _brisk._

Seriously, over a thousand new threads on a subreddit that didn’t even exist six hours ago? 

Sometimes he astonished himself.

Also it was kind of depressing that so many people were being screwed over, even after he filtered out the ones that were talking about their neighbors preventing them from planting a garden on their own properties.

(As a side note, Hardison had recently gained a severe dislike of all Home Owner’s Associations. Like, Hardison had spent the past few years conning bad guys, but HOAs were _evil._ )

Anyway.

Remus Lupin’s post wasn’t anything particularly remarkable - something to do with his friend’s will and his kid? - but what _was_ remarkable was the fact that he had _zero_ online presence.

Like, literally _zero._

Nothing.

Nada.

It was like the guy had just appeared out of thin air a month ago. There weren’t any traces of him being in witness protection or anything similar, either - and Hardison would know, because he’d checked the databases in every single country, even the super secret databases that weren’t supposed to exist, and he couldn’t track down a birth certificate.

It was pretty damn impressive.

If nothing else, Hardison wanted to meet the guy based on that information alone.

And the helping people thing, too, of course. It seemed to be a pretty straightforward issue in any case.

The only problem was that Remus Lupin was in London, England, and according to his bank account wouldn’t be able to afford a trans-Atlantic flight.

But that wasn’t even really a problem, actually, since Skype was a thing and Hardison refused to use Zoom on principle.

Age of the geek, baby.

Remus Lupin was an unremarkable man, but not in the way that Eliot tried to make himself look unremarkable on cons, Parker thought. He looked unremarkable in the way that Alice White looked unremarkable, only not really.

He looked the kind of unremarkable that meant he was scared of being remarkable, because being remarkable meant people could see him and get close to him, and that was bad because he thought he was dangerous and he didn’t want to be.

So maybe a little bit like Eliot.

He wasn’t that great with technology, either, she decided after watching him try to unmute himself for several minutes. Which was weird, because Hardison had been practically vibrating out of his skin before the (very heavily encrypted) Skype call, and he only vibrated at that frequency when there was something tech-y about to happen.

Eventually, Hardison just unmuted him remotely, to save everyone some time.

“Ah,” Remus Lupin said, looking faintly embarrassed. His hair was greying at the edges in a way that made him look tired instead of old, and there were some faint scratches that looked kind of like claw marks just peeking out from beneath the collar of his shirt. “Apologies. Are you, erm...Leverage?”

Nate nodded. “Yes, we are, Mr. Lupin. Do you have any questions before we begin?”

Parker had a couple, but she recognized now that Nate wasn’t asking her but the potential client.

Lupin hesitated for a long moment, then shook his head. “Nothing that can’t wait until you’ve heard my story, I suppose… I don’t know if you’d be able to do much either way…”

Sophie smiled at him in the way that made her seem friendly even if she wasn’t sure what to make of you. Parker was very familiar with that smile.

“Why don’t you tell us anyway, Mr. Lupin?” Nate said in his Insurance Voice, the one that made him sound like he was trying to sound like he wasn’t trying to sell you something when he actually was. 

Hardison called it Nate’s “car salesman voice,” but Parker disagreed. It sounded _nothing_ like Sophie’s car-selling voice, because she didn’t even try to pretend that she wasn’t selling something, which was what a car salesman did.

Parker mostly tuned out Lupin’s story about how his best friend had died and his son had been taken away to live with relatives because they were the closest living kin and how he was worried about the kid because his father had been Desi and the relatives were pretty racist - not because the story wasn’t important, because it was, but because Lupin was talking around something and she didn’t know what it was yet.

Parker let his words wash over her, paying more attention to his body language and the way he was talking instead of the words coming out of his mouth. He paused slightly in weird places, like the face Eliot made when his soup wasn’t quite right and he couldn’t figure out what it was missing, and couldn’t seem to explain properly why he couldn’t just apply for custody or whatever people did to adopt kids who wouldn’t set anything in their houses on fire.

Lupin rubbed the bridge of his nose for a moment, frustrated, and then when he opened his eyes again they caught the light for a split second and seemed to flash gold.

Oh.

“You know, you can just _say_ it’s a wizard thing,” she said, and Lupin’s face went slack with shock.

Sophie nodded. “That does turn a new light on some things,” she agreed.

“I - Apologies, I wasn’t aware that you - _knew -_ about us, that is - ”

Nate sighed deeply. “Now that it’s established that we _do,_ let’s take it from the top. And no obfustication this time, please.”

So Lupin did.

“So the relatives are not only racist, but also magic-ist,” Parker summed up. “And since the kid’s famous the house has wards and stuff up that make it so that you can’t just take him home with you - ”

“Parker, that’s not how adoption works - ” Eliot tried to cut in, but Parker ignored him because that’s what Archie had done so clearly it worked like that _sometimes._

“ - And also you can’t adopt him officially because you’re a werewolf and there are laws against that,” she finished, the word ‘law’ tasting weird in her mouth.

Lupin nodded slowly, like there was a weight hanging from his chin. He didn’t have a beard, though, so there wasn’t any place to hook on a weight. Maybe he should grow one.

“We’ll discuss your case, Mr. Lupin, and we’ll let you know if we can help,” Nate said.

Lupin’s mouth twitched upwards at the corner, like he was trying to smile but it took too much effort. “Please do, Mr. Ford. Anything to make Harry safe.”

Then the screen went black.

There was a long moment of silence, and Parker was starting to get kind of worried because Hardison had been quiet for a long time.

But then he inhaled sharply and said pointedly, not looking at anyone in particular, “Was anyone ever gonna tell me that magic is a thing that exists? Or were y’all just gonna let me make a fool of myself?”

“Ah,” said Nate.

“We thought you knew?” tried Sophie. “Once you start stealing internationally, it’s rather difficult _not_ to bump into a spell or two.”

Eliot just sighed heavily. 

“It’s not like it comes up _that_ often,” said Parker knowledgeably. “And also magic plus technology equals explosions.”

“I do not want to know how you know that,” Hardison declared, staring up at the ceiling and possibly having a mental breakdown as his entire worldview shifted. “...I’m not going to be able to do the briefing on this one, am I.”

Eliot didn’t bother trying to hide his grin, but let one of his hands rest on Hardison’s shoulder for a moment before he left for the kitchen.

Hardison sighed. “Thanks, man.”

Parker patted him twice on the head.

He sighed again. “Thanks, babe.” 

"I _knew_ those 'gas explosions' were a hoax!"

They took the job, because of course they did. There was a kid involved, and wizard child services was apparently basically nonexistent, according to Sophie.

“This is Harry Potter,” Sophie said, because apparently she was doing the briefing this time. She pointed to the television screen in their London hotel room, and Hardison obligingly pulled up a picture of the kid that he’d taken from a traffic cam near the kid’s elementary school. As a bonus, he also pulled up the sketch Parker had made based on Lupin’s description of the kid’s father and one moving (!!!) photograph that Lupin had held up a few feet away from the camera, unsure exactly how magical (!!!!!) pictures and technology would work together.

“Thank you, Hardison.” Sophie smiled at him before continuing. “The majority of wizarding Britain believes that Harry defeated the evil Dark Lord as a baby, which is how he got his lightning scar.”

“It doesn’t _look_ like a lightning scar,” Eliot said, sounding dubious. “I ain’t seein’ any Lichtenberg figures. What?” he added when everyone turned to look at him. “It’s a very distinctive scar.”

“Lightning-bolt- _shaped,_ then.” Sophie rolled her eyes. “In any case, Harry’s parents died that night, and he was sent to live with his mother’s sister, Petunia, and her husband and son.” Hardison pulled up three more photos - one of a horse-faced woman, one of a portly man in front of a nondescript company building, and one of a very chubby toddler, which he may or may not have copied directly from Petunia Dursley’s Facebook page.

“Can’t imagine why anyone who knew Lily would’ve allowed that,” Sophie muttered under her breath, staring at the photos for a long moment, then blinked herself back into the present. She continued in a louder voice, “Petunia Dursley absolutely _detests_ magic and hadn’t spoken to her sister in years when Harry was apparently _left on her doorstep in the middle of the night - ”_ She broke off to take a deep, calming breath.

“There aren’t any photos of Harry on the Dursley’s social media, either,” Hardison added, because it was pretty worrying. “There’s thousands of Dudley - that’s Petunia’s son - and a couple dozen of her and her husband, but there’s barely any traces of a fourth person living in the house, according to the photos, which is worse than there being zero traces.”

“Why is that worse?” Parker asked blankly.

“Because _zero_ traces means that someone’s going through and erasing his existence from every picture,” Eliot answered before Hardison could. “ _Barely_ any traces means that either someone’s erasing him but doesn’t care enough to do it completely, or they’re doing it on purpose to use him as bait.”

“Or,” Nate added, “no one is erasing Harry from the photos and the Dursley’s are purposely pretending that he doesn’t exist.”

There was a long moment of silence as that sunk in.

“...I’m not sure which is worse,” Haridson said quietly.

Nate took a deep breath. “Okay, Hardison, you’re with Eliot and Parker. Do recon on the Dursley house, figure out how close to the house we can get before your tech starts malfunctioning, what security systems they have, the works. You know what to do. Sophie, you’re with me - we’re going to the government building to see what we can find on the magical protections on the house. They must have a - a tracking spell or something on the kid, right? We need to make sure that the wizards won’t just take him back to the Dursleys.”

Sophie grinned impishly. “I have a few contacts in the wizarding world. I’m sure we can figure something out.”

Nate looked at her for a long moment before nodding. It really was a mark of his improvement that he didn’t immediately interrogate her about who, exactly, her contacts were. “Okay, everybody. Let’s go steal a wizard.”

“Oh my, Elphia Wittensprite, is that you? It’s been _ages_ since we last spoke!”

“My dear Rita Skeeter! It has, it has. And, may I say, I simply _love_ your dress! Madame Malkin’s, of course?”

“Why, who else?”

“Absolutely marvelous, yes, I’d recognize her wandwork anywhere. Oh, that’s right, I heard that you just started working for the _Daily Prophet,_ didn’t you? Congratulations! Say, have you heard anything about...”

Little Whinging was the kind of place that popped up anywhere there was a suburb. Dozens of houses all in a row, all exactly the same down to the color their window sills were painted, perfectly manicured lawns, freshly polished cars in the driveways whose paint jobs glinted in the sunlight and dared their neighbor to just try and look better.

Eliot had seen three of them pop up within a fifteen minute drive of his pop’s old store in the two years before he’d gone and joined up.

He hated them.

A glance at Hardison’s and Parker’s expressions revealed that they felt the same.

They all knew that under the surface of this cookie-cutter copy-paste picturesque suburb was something dark and twisted and -

Well, it was nothing good.

“Oh, are you her boyfriend?” the real estate agent asked, gesturing over to where Hardison was opening the car door for Parker, as he unlocked the door to Number Two, Privet Drive, which was _coincidentally_ right next door to the Dursleys.

“Her brother, actually,” Eliot said, ignoring the way that the words felt wrong in his mouth and pretending that everything was fine. “Her boyfriend’s over there.”

The real estate agent did a double take and the corner of his mouth twitched downward.

Eliot smiled like he didn’t want to deck the guy in the face. “Her fiance, actually,” he added, leaning into his Southern drawl. “An’ ah wanna buy ‘em a weddin’ present or two ‘fore ah go back ta Texas next week. Ya think ya can help me out?”

Dollar signs - or pound signs, he guessed, since they were in England - flashed in the man’s eyes and suddenly he didn’t care about anything except trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of the dumb American, which was exactly Eliot’s plan.

“How’re the neighbors?” Eliot asked, aiming to coax some information out of the real estate agent so that he was at least useful for _something._ “Ah dun’ wan’ mah sis ta be near any crime an’ ah heard someone on this here street was embezzlin’ or somethin’...”

He had, in fact, heard that Vernon Dursley was embezzling hundreds of pounds a month from his drill company - Grunting’s, or whatever it was called. Hardison had told him, so it had to be true.

“Oh, oh no, nothing like that!” the real estate agent stuttered, flustered. “No - no, I haven’t heard anything like that. Everyone in this neighborhood is very proper, very nice, the sort of people you can just ask for a cup of sugar -- the people next door, the Dursleys, for example. Very respectable people. The husband works at the factory - the manager, I believe! - and his wife stays at home and watches her boy, how old is he now? Oh, he must be three now, they _do_ grow up so fast…”

“Oh - could that be? Andromeda Tonks, it _is_ you!”

“Elphia! I haven’t seen you in ages! Ah, that’s right - do you know Arthur Weasley?”

“No, I’m afraid I haven’t had the pleasure. Elphia Wittensprite, a pleasure to meet you.”

“Miss Wittensprite, the pleasure is all mine. I’ve heard so much about you!”

“All good, I hope! Oh - that’s right, sorry, you go on ahead, we need to go to the guest entrance, don’t we?”

“And who’s this quiet chap?”

“Johan Guttensberg. Pleased to be meeting you, I am sure.”

“Yes, good to meet you too, Mister Goo-tens-burg.”

“He prefers Johan, please. He went to Durmstrang, you know, and I met him on one of my trips - oh, the guest entrance, right - ”

“Nonsense, Elphia, just come on through with us. You _must_ tell us all about your trip!”

“Parker, can you stop laughing? Please?” Eliot asked politely.

Parker took a long, gasping breath and held it for so long that she started to go red in the face.

Eliot sighed deeply.

That was the last straw. Parker couldn’t hold back anymore, and burst out laughing again.

“Babe, please, people are starting to stare and we’re trying to go unnoticed - ”

“But Alec! _Look_ at their security systems! They - they think it’ll keep out thieves - ”

“...You gotta admit, Eliot, it _is_ hilarious.”

Eliot walked a few steps away to peer intently at a mailbox and pretend he didn’t know them, biting his lip so that he didn’t let loose the chuckle that was building in his chest.

“Nate, Harry has a godfather. It’s not Lupin, but the Potter’s will dictates that if they were to die during the war, Harry should go to live with his godfather.”

“Who is it? And why isn’t the kid living with him?”

“The name is Sirius - ah. Sirius Black.”

“Sounds like you know him, Soph.”

“No, not exactly - regardless, he’s in jail.”

“Ah. What for?”

“Mass murder.”

“Hm. Probably not someone we want around a kid then.”

“Probably not.”

“Unless it was...self-defense?”

“Mass murder in self-defense? That doesn’t seem very likely, Nate - oh. Huh.”

“I don’t like the sound of that ‘huh.’”

“There’s nothing wrong with - ”

“That’s the same ‘huh’ you say right before you take over a government, Soph. Please tell me we aren’t about to take over another government.”

“I’d hardly call this a _government_ \- ”

“Sophie. What did you find.”

“There’s no record of a trial.”

“...I’m not getting _any_ interference,” Hardison said incredulously from where he was sprawled in the backseat of their rental car. The roof wasn’t high enough for him to sit up straight, and the space between the front and back seats was too narrow for him to be able to fold his legs comfortably. He’d ended up stretching out across the seats and also Eliot, because Parker had claimed the driver’s seat and then commandeered the passenger’s seat for the truly humongous basket of chocolate the real estate agent had given her, because that was apparently a thing that realtors did.

“Seriously?” asked Eliot, who had submitted to his new job as a backrest without comment. 

Parker craned her neck around the driver’s seat to look at the screen of Hardison’s laptop. “Nuffink?” she asked incredulously, mouth full of chocolate.

“Nothing. Nada. Zilch.”

“...Maybe we just need to get closer,” Eliot said, though he didn’t sound too hopeful.

In an instant, Parker was out of the car and touching the Dursley’s front door. 

_“Can you still hear me?”_ she asked, and her voice came through the earphones clearly, and so did the sound from the television that was clearly playing inside the house which was. Not something that they’d been expecting. Magic should have rendered it useless.

“...We should probably call in Lupin,” Eliot said, staring his Death Stare at Number Four, Privet Drive.

“Aw, now I won’t get to use my new drone.”

“Okay, so, so maybe someone just hasn’t put the record in just yet. They just finished a war, so it would make sense if they were a bit behind in their paperwork.”

“ _Magic,_ Nate, honestly. The files are charmed to match the trial records in real time. Which means - ”

“There was no trial.”

“Rather suspicious, don’t you think? And - just saying! - if we _did_ manage to, you know, get to the bottom of this, it would be easy enough to overturn this _oddly new_ law that doesn’t allow werewolves to adopt children...”

“...Fine, you win. Let’s go steal a government. Again.”

“Are we getting predictable?”

“I hope not. Do I need to pull Hardison?”

“To help wrangle the law books? Ooh, yes, he’s quite good at that.”

“Done.”

“Thousands of years of laws _overnight?_ Are you _crazy?”_

“Yeah, but can you do it? The books have charms on them to make it easier, I think - ”

“Yes, anything you’ve already read should be highlighted in red, and if you tap a quill against a phrase five times then it will search the rest of the book for matches, and if you only tap twice then it _should_ highlight the text in green and create a bookmark, if I’m not mistaken.”

“...Nate, Sophie, I love you, but y’all’re asking me to do some bullshit right now.”

“Sophie and I need to work the representatives, make them vote our way - ”

“Hey, I never said I wouldn’t do it! But you’re gonna owe me _so_ many gummy frogs. This is the _second_ time I’ve had to memorize an entire country’s worth of laws in an absurdly short time.”

“You’ll have all the gummy frogs and orange soda you want, Hardison. We’ll even buy you a brand new Lucille if you’d like.”

”Well, _buy_ seems like a strong word...”

“Now you’re talking. Where would you be without me?”

“Dead by now, probably.”

“Nate, dear, now is not the time for the thing you call humor.”

“Hey, that was funny, right, Hardison?”

“No, Nate, it wasn’t.”

They came back at night with Lupin in tow but without Hardison, because apparently Nate and Sophie needed him to overhaul the entire wizarding legal system.

Eliot did not envy them, even though Parker was the one about to go up a security system that she couldn’t even sense, and _he_ was the one who was going to have to fight any other wizards if they showed up.

Lupin muttered something that sounded vaguely like bastardized Latin and waved his wand in a distinctive pattern that Eliot filed away for later. The wand emitted a faint reddish light that sluggishly shaped itself into what Eliot immediately recognized as a 3D version of the house’s floor plan, since it was literally _exactly_ the same as the one next door to it. Four golden pinpricks appeared after a moment, and Eliot glanced up at Lupin, wondering if that was the end of the spell.

Lupin had gone pale.

“...Lupin?” Eliot asked after a moment. 

Lupin’s jaw worked, like he had to forcibly unclench his teeth before responding. “This spell is meant to reveal security measures on an estate,” he said calmly, and neither Parker nor Eliot asked why he knew that. “A model of the house appears in red and lifesigns in gold. The most basic security measures should appear in green, intermediate in blue, and high level security should be in purple.”

There was a tiny dot of purple on the single golden pinprick that was downstairs, and nothing else.

“Okay,” Parker announced, and Eliot’s eyes snapped to her. “We’re going in _now._ ”

It was a matter of minutes to break in, grab the kid (who was apparently sleeping in _the cupboard under the stairs,_ what the _fuck_ ), and get out, and Eliot didn’t even get to punch anything.

Which was unfortunate, because he really, _really_ felt like punching something.

“Mister Black has been found _not guilty_ by proof of veritaserum! His name shall be cleared immediately and his wand restored to him. He will also be compensated for his time wrongly spent in Azkaban in the sum of one hundred galleons per month. Dismissed!”

“Really, Madame Bones, I can’t thank you enough…”

“No, no, Miss Wittensprite, thank you for bringing this to my attention! Letting this slip through the cracks would have been a travesty.”

“And it certainly didn’t hurt that it endeared you to your boss!”

“Miss _Witten_ sprite!”

“Yes, yes, I know, justice is its own reward, you’re just the same as always, haha! Though, I must say, isn’t it odd that Professor Dumbledore tried so hard to sweep this under the rug…”

“Professor Dumbledore, you said? I didn’t really notice…”

“Oh, perhaps it was my imagination, then. Silly me! You know, I seem to remember seeing his name on something else recently… Oh, what _was_ it? A bill to do with werewolves, I think…”

“The Anti-Werewolf Adoption Act? _Dumbledore?_ ”

“Perhaps my mind is playing tricks on me, but I could _swear_ I saw his name…”

“You’re very rarely wrong, Miss Wittensprite. Don’t worry, I’ll look into this personally.”

“Harry!” Sirius cheered, looking significantly less like a corpse who’d just crawled out of a grave than he had before Sophie had gotten her hands on him. He crouched on the ground so that he was at Harry’s eye level and grinned widely when Harry reached out to tug curiously at his hair. “And Moony too, I guess!” he added, glancing up to meet Remus’ eyes.

“Not a murderer then, eh, Sirius?” Remus replied wryly, pretending like he hadn’t collapsed on the ground and sobbed his eyes out when he’d learnt Sirius hadn’t betrayed James and Lily and was, in fact, innocent. He was very good at pretending, Remus was.

“Nope!” agreed Sirius, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“I think they may have overdone it with the cheering charms,” Sophie said under her breath, though Sirius and his doggish hearing heard every word.

He stepped towards her, suddenly solemn. “Miss Deveraux - or would you prefer Miss Wittensprite? - I don’t know how I could ever repay you for what you’ve done for us.”

Sophie exchanged a glance with her team. “There’s no need for payment, Mr. Black, Mr. Lupin. We have an... _alternate_ stream of revenue.”

“However,” Nate added, “if you or a friend find themself in a situation like this again, just let us know. We’ll provide...”

He grinned sharply.

“Leverage.”

**Author's Note:**

> sirius and remus, fed up with the bullshit that is wizarding britain, get a house together in portland and raise harry there. leverage "coincidentally" is also there. am i saying that they babysit harry sometimes? yes. yes i am.
> 
> is sophie a witch? nobody knows. maybe that's why hardison can't find her birth certificate.  
> (if sophie WERE a witch, she would never use charms or love potions on a mark. there's no challenge in that.)
> 
> first year:  
> ron: oh no this lock won't open what do we do  
> harry, removing a bobby pin parker gave him from his mess of hair: it's my time to shine  
> hermione, using magic instead of being dramatic: alohamora! hurry hurry filch is gonna see us
> 
> also i have never in my life used reddit so lmk if my terminology is wrong


End file.
